Originally published in Loaves & Fishes, Clairvaux Farm, Elkton, MD.
“Think of them laughing, singing,
loving their people
and all people
who put love before power
then put love with power
which is necessary
to destroy power without love.” 1 “An anonymous tribute to the people of Vietnam,” from Norman Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979), cited in Stephen Charles Mott, Biblical Ethics and Social Change (NY: Oxford, 1982), p. 167.
In the midst of the government-led terror in El Salvador, members of many villages in Chalatenango province met for prayer, Bible study, and discussion of questions of the most immediate and compelling nature.
“In the spirit of the base community, they gathered together in the name of God to pray and meditate on the problem. “Do we have the right to let someone kill us?” was the first question. And after dialogue the group concluded they did have the right to let someone kill them. After all Jesus must have allowed himself to be killed. Next question: “Do we have the right to allow someone to kill our parents, children, or our old grandmother?” This is a different situation. To allow such a thing would mean complicity with violence. Hence, after much discussion, the group concluded they were not free, they did not have the luxury of letting someone kill their own.” 2Blase Bonpane, Guerillas of Peace (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1987), pp. 20-21.
There are important reasons why similar discussions do not take place among poor and homeless people in communities throughout this country, not to mention happening among the people who wish to help them.
The core of the work which we must do in order to be of help is to create a space in which they can defend themselves. To do this we must free ourselves of illusions which we now do not even question; the other part is to learn to make friends. Neither is easy.
The same power which oppresses the Central American campesina and turns her into a guerilla also casts the homeless man into a shelter in a city in the United States. The way that each is treated, the way that each responds to their treatment, the way that each ends their life, has a great deal to do with the frame of reference and the depth of the relationships which exist in their respective cultures.
The woman of Central America has spent most of her life making meals, raising children, weaving cloth. She has lived in poverty but also in community, where sharing is life. She knows that individual independence is rooted in human solidarity. She has seen labor union leaders and land reform organizers and even elementary school teachers taken away to be tortured, often to be killed, sometimes just to “disappear.” She understands why they stood up. She knows that people, like seeds, sometimes must lay themselves down that life may continue after them. She, like them, knows that standing up for people is the only way to stand up for oneself.
She has heard leaders of the U.S., visiting her country, proclaim her government to be “moderate” and “democratic.” She has seen the devastation of U.S.-made weapons in the hands of her country’s military. She knows that her government is a client state, sanctioned and supported by the United States, supporting the interests of a super-rich minority. She has seen the countryside turned into a charnel house to defend these interests. Vast power, desperate determination, and a willingness to slaughter and destroy are evident.
She decides to stand up and to resist the outlaw government, just the same. She can not continue to be who she is unless she does. She has lost family members and friends to this state-sponsored terror. She must defend herself, all that she is. She knows these things without being able to put them into words, without having read them, since she cannot read, without having thought them through to a logical conclusion. Compassion and self-defense are one. She understands this in her heart. The reign of indecency in her nation must be opposed by all who are decent. She will give her life to change her world.
A homeless man comes in out of freezing weather to the warmth of a city shelter. He thinks about the people of Somalia.
“We say, ‘God bless America!’ But God didn’t just bless America. God blessed the world. Do you know what I mean?”
This man demonstrates a compassion which his President and elected officials have failed to show. Feeding the children of Somalia is not a justification for the existence of a bloated military budget. The lingering deaths of the children of Iraq at the hands of this same military are beyond his ability ever to approve — equally the deaths of Nicaragua’s children at the hands of our proxy warriors, the Contras.
Later on, on the subject of drinking, he remarks that two men will go off with a bottle and mutually encourage on another to get drunk. “Then they’ll need to lean on each other to walk. They need to lean on each other when they aren’t drunk. That’s what I say.”
He has almost as little illusion about U.S. domestic policy as his Central American sister has about U.S. foreign policy. Both know that the “aid” they receive is in someone else’s interest, first of all. Their ability to resist the tide which threatens their lives depends upon having around them a community which shares their hopes and which lives with as little illusion as they do.
In the United States, such community is fragile and sparse. We tend to treat the poor with charity, which is not friendly but sentimental. Poverty is not seen as a reality for which we are collectively responsible but as a personal characteristic, even a choice. As a result, the poor lead a harsh, de-politicized, serial existence. Their efforts to lean on one another are either ignored or pointed to as evidence of the unworthiness of all those who have not yet “made it.”
By engaging the poor on these terms, by conceiving of the poor in this manner, we effectively attack them. Charity does not allow us to make friends with the poor or invite us to shed our illusions about their condition and our own. We do not need death squads to keep the poor in their place if we have so effectively disempowered them by the consensus regarding their plight. If, as a rule, we discuss poverty (and wealth) and treat the poor (and the rich) in a way which eliminates the possibility that these questions could ever become points of real debate, they will never become points of rebellion, either personal or collective.
Unlike the compassion of the Central American woman who has chosen to resist, our compassion will have been diverted into a denigrating and sentimental “help” if it does not concede even the possibility that our own humanity is in jeopardy if we allow such conditions to persist. There is no more effective way to leave the poor alone.
But when we understand that compassion is self-defense, we must admit that there are powerful forms of dominance and privilege whose interests lie in keeping the structure of wealth and poverty in tact and, therefore, encourage the deceit that “poverty” should be addressed without ever calling this structure into question.
Hand in hand with shedding our illusions goes the task of making friends. When the homeless, for example, are our friends, we do not accept their mistreatment nor do we settle for their being trated “charitably.” We require just treatment.
These are our friends. These are children and grandparents and veterans and working people and neighbors and co-workers and co-religionists. These are our people. We approach them as friends. We enter into community with them. We travel together with them along paths impossible to foresee and stay with them for life. We become a new being with them, even without the permission of the powerful, lawless, callous ones who rule.
We practice being present with the poor, making friends, not serving, and creating communities of such a practice. In such communities, we all can prepare to resist the further oppression of those already marginalized and disadvantaged.
Our lives depend upon this. We defend our friends; in the course of this defense, we will be defending ourselves, as well.
They are vulnerable, they are dependent, as are we, to the extent that they are not in obvious solidarity, in community, with other human beings. Independence arises from solidarity.
Instead of partial acts of charity and aid, the jeweled net of compassion, the safety net of human community, the seamless garment of love.
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Footnotes
- 1“An anonymous tribute to the people of Vietnam,” from Norman Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979), cited in Stephen Charles Mott, Biblical Ethics and Social Change (NY: Oxford, 1982), p. 167.
- 2Blase Bonpane, Guerillas of Peace (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1987), pp. 20-21.